Lots of Character Builds in Diablo III

Posted By: October 22, 2010

Blizzard hosted their usual FanSite Summit event the day before Blizzcon, and while no write ups from a Diablo perspective are available (since I didn’t go this year), a dude from The Escapist did get one interesting tidbit from his lunchtime conversation. A quote:

The Escapist spoke with Blizzard’s Alex Mayberry, senior producer on Diablo III, prior to tomorrow’s ceremonies that kick off BlizzCon 2010. With the new overhauled skill system and the different runes that influence them, said Mayberry, one of the team members had done the math to work out how many possible build combinations there were for every class in the game.

The answer he came away with was a staggering 97 billion potential combinations and permutations. That’s before taking into account any equipment, weaponry, or attribute-boosting gems, too – which will almost certainly boost that number to hard-to-believe heights.

We’ve previously heard that each class will have around 700 skill options, with 25-30 skills and 5 runestones in each skill. Can anyone figure the math on that to scale up to 97b? Is that every possible skill combination per character? e.g., 30 x 29 x 28 x 27,… etc. Then x 5 classes?